Our genre television has a sometimes not-so-explicit legacy of refugee stories and characters.

How do they inform larger cultural opinion?

If youve been watchingSupergirl, then you know the superhero dramas most interesting characters are alien refugees.

As Charlie Jane Anders put it in a 2008 io9 article titledScience Fiction is The Literature of Refugees…

Possibly the most pervasive narrative in science fiction is actually the story of refugees.

They flee from planetary destruction, war, or just from overcrowding and ecological crappitude.

Pop culture characters can give underrepresented demographics visibility and greater cultural worth as human beings.

Refugee Characters vs.

They cannot return to their home without risking death.

On the other end of the refugee-immigrant spectrum, many of the background characters inFireflyqualify as science fiction immigrants.

OnSupergirl,refugee characters like Kara or Kal-El didnt have superpowers on their home planets.

They were like everyone else.

However, those powers that differentiates them from their communities makes the general population wary of them.

OnSupergirl,Maxwell Lord speaks publicly about his belief that Supergirl is a threat to humanity.

Kara occasionally becomesveryangry about what happened to her home world.

It still affects how she sees herself and the people around her.

Unlike Clark Kent, Kara remembers what Krypton and her Kryptonian family were like.

She spent many of her formative years there.

She completely understands what she lost and she grieves for it.

The terms of the truce: as long as the Zygons stay disguised as humans, they can stay.

It is a much-needed message and was an incredibly powerful, topical TV moment.

If not for the Time War, the Zygons probably would not have had to flee their home world.

It is also one of the main, underlying themes of that great refugee dramaBattlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galacticawas created as an allegory to 9/11 and the huge cultural and political shifts that followed.

For me, this is not a direct allegory.

I dont think the writers ofBattlestar Galacticaare trying to say that real-life refugees often cause their own crisis.

After all, the Cylons were created by humanity.

They were a slave race, looked upon as less-than human and forced to serve the dominant culture.

In that way, the Cylons themselves became refugees in search of a home.

By the end of the episode (spoiler!

However, within the fleet, there are those who are treated as valuable, permanent citizens (i.e.

Throughout the course of the entire series, there is a constant tension within the population of the fleet.

Survival is not guaranteed.